I have a meeting on Monday morning and thought I’d be smart to place an order this afternoon before I forgot in the hopes it might hit next week if ADI’s price improved a lot. Instead, stocks had a strong afternoon and ADI moved higher with the tide. While ADI was trading at $89.48, I…
Month End Summary – February 2018
I lost a few bucks in February, but not as much as the major indexes thanks to most of my options beginning the month out of the money. I don’t have the same benefit on all my investments coming into March, but the few that I have (ADI, AAPL, NFLX) out of the money will…
Options Expiration – February 2018
I had no options remaining to expire today, so I’m giving a short recap of what’s in my account at the end of the week. – 1 GS March $265 naked put with GS trading at $267.62 – 1 ADI March $85 naked put with ADI trading at $86.09 – 1 XLB March $63 naked…
Rolled AAPL Naked Put to April
My AAPL naked put was the only option I had set to expire in February and the timing of AAPL’s move higher worked out well for me. AAPL fell as low as $150.29 intraday on February 9. I thought I had a strong probability of having the option assigned, but the iPhone maker recovered even…
Rolled NFLX Naked Put to April
Remember last week when I didn’t want to spend $43 to close my NFLX naked put? Well, that would’ve been a bargain compared to what I spent today. The good news is that I didn’t make today’s trade out of fear of an option assignment. Instead, I rolled my position higher to take advantage of…
Month End Summary – January 2018
It feels good to be back in the swing of things and making more trades than I did in most months last year. One drawback to selling options is that you don’t get the big upswings in your account balance when the markets make big moves higher. This lag can be discouraging for those who…
Sold XLB Naked Put
I placed a limit order for an XLB (Materials Select Sector SPDR ETF) naked put one week ago when XLB was trading at $62.92, but XLB was still coming off lows from a week earlier at that point and the VIX was 3-4 points lower than today. So, when XLB climbed to $64.17, I figured…
Sold GS Naked Put
Barron’s cover story from this weekend was on Goldman Sachs Group ($GS). While I try to read most of the articles in Barron’s every weekend, I rarely read more than half of them. This past weekend I made it through more than usual, including the bullish article on GS. Not every cover story speaks to…
Option Trades on UUP and TLT
The last time I traded UUP I lost almost $279. That was in August 2011 and haven’t thought of the PowerShares DB US Dollar Bullish ETF since then enough to make another trade, until yesterday. I’ve been watching the US dollar lose ground and finally decided I should try to make a profit on it, but…